d of our children.
Some school books will be worth more than all these golden locks. I
am glad the children are asleep, for they love to play with my hair,
and it would grieve them to see me cut it off."

The good Alice took her scissors, and cut off lock after lock, till
all were gone, save a few which she left around her forehead. Then
she put on her simple muslin cap and tied it with a muslin string
under her chin.

Just then, her boy awoke. Alice had laid him down on his bed, and
the first sight the little fellow saw, when he awoke, was his
mother's hair which almost covered him up.

"Why, Mother, how could you do so? How could you cut off your pretty
hair, and put on that ugly cap? What would father say? You said we
must do what we thought would please him. It would not please him to
have you cut off your pretty hair;" and the child burst into an
agony of tears.

"Would it not please him that you should have a spelling book and a
slate to write on, William? With this hair I can buy them for you. I
have no other riches now."

The poor boy still wept. The hair was more to him, at that time,
than all learning. He could not then have believed that the time
would come, when he would remember with gratitude his mother's
sacrifice for him and his little sister.

Alice gathered the locks, took from a drawer her last bit of blue
ribbon, and tied them, saying, "This is the way he liked to see my
hair tied when I was at my father's cottage. I shall never tie it so
again."

When the good vicar came to see Alice, as he did every day, she met
him with me all nicely done up in a paper in her hands, and asked
him if he would be so good as to take me to the hair dresser who had
advertised for hair, make the best bargain he could for her, and,
with the proceeds, get the few necessaries for commencing her small
school. The good man cheerfully promised to do so, took the parcel
from Alice, and carried it to his own house.

And so I bade farewell to dear Alice, and her neat cottage, and her
sweet children. I was parted forever from that innocent head that
had cherished only good and pure thoughts. I was no longer to be
dressed by her dear hands. I was never again to shade and adorn her
lovely face, nor fall in ringlets around her sloping shoulders, nor
ever tremble again with the beatings of her gay and generous heart,
as I often had when she let me fall over her neck and shoulders.

Nothing that ever had life in it could